A Cambridgeshire Green Party campaigner is among a group of anti-Trident protesters, protesting their innocence before the High Court over a demonstration at a nuclear bomb factory.

Angela Ditchfield, 38, was one of five people arrested and convicted after a demonstration at Burghfield Atomic Weapons Establishment are fighting in the High Court to prove that their actions were lawful.

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Activists barred the entrance to the Berkshire site where Trident nuclear warheads are assembled,in June last year, by lying down "chained up and glued together".

The group were later convicted of wilful obstruction of the highway at Reading Magistrates' Court.

Ms Ditchfield of King's Hedges and protesters Nina Carter-Brown, 33; Nick Cooper, 34; Joanna Frew, 37, and Alison Parker, 33, were all sentenced in January to six-week conditional discharges, with costs of £100 and a surcharge of £20.

But now they are asking senior judges, Lord Justice Burnett and Sir Wyn Williams, to rule that their convictions were not valid - claiming they were not actually lying on the public highway.

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Trident mounted nuclear warheads are assembled at Burghfield, which has been the site of repeated demonstrations for a number of years.

The protesters' bid to clear their names comes shortly after the adoption, earlier this month, of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, by 122 nations, the first multilateral legally-binding instrument for nuclear disarmament to have been negotiated in 20 years.

The UK and other nuclear weapons-armed countries did not support this process and were not present.

However the Treaty will come into force in September, and, once it receives 50 state ratifications, it enters into international law in the same way as the bans on biological and chemical weapons, regardless of whether the UK ratifies it.

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Joanna Buckley for the protestors, told the High Court today that their challenge centres on uncertainty over where the boundary lies between the public highway and the private Ministry of Defence-owned road leading up to the bomb plant.

The barrister told the judges that a "green line" painted on the road to delineate the boundary was - according to maps - "in the wrong place", meaning that the activists ought not to have been found guilty.

Miss Buckley said the judge could not have been "sure beyond a reasonable doubt" that the chained activists were on a public road at all.

She told the court that the judge had accepted evidence from an officer of West Berkshire Council's Highways Department indicating that the green line may have been painted approximately 1.3m closer to the factory than it ought to have been, according to local authority maps.

"The judge concluded from expert evidence that there must a be a possibility that the line was in the wrong place," Miss Buckley said.

"The precise position of the highway boundary was critical in deciding whether they had committed an offence.

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"Without a proper determination of the where the highway boundary was, it is not possible to conclude without a reasonable doubt that they were located on a highway at the relevant time," she told the court.

The barrister explained that local council maps showed the highway boundary was in line with hedges running parallel to the main Reading Road .

It was "possible that the green line was in the wrong place" by 1.3m or even more, she claimed.

"If the green line was 1.3m closer to the junction, they would have obstructed the highway by, at most, centimetres," she said.

Even if there was an obstruction of the highway, it was minute and trivial, she argued.

Lord Justice Burnett told Miss Buckley: "The issue is a very simple one.

"The highway had a boundary which somewhere lay across the road. The question is whether the green line was in the right place and marked the boundary.

"If the MoD got the boundary in the right place, your clients were fairly and squarely chained up and glued together on the highway."

"But if there was a gap between where the MoD drew the green line and the true start of the highway, that gap doesn't automatically became a highway," he added.

The judges delayed giving their decision in the case and will give their ruling at an unspecified later date.

Ms Ditchfield who was a Green Party candidate at the county council elections in May, attended the hearing along with Cranfield University lecturer, Alison Parker, and Nicholas Cooper.